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Diamond in the Dunes

Diamond in the Dunes is the true story of hope and baseball in China's Xinjiang Province - a region harshly divided between an indigenous Muslim minority and the ruling Han Chinese. The film follows Parhat Ablat, a 20-year-old Uyghur shepherd, as he attends the region's racially segregated Xinjiang University and forms an integrated baseball team. Parhat is on a fraught quest to raise his people out of what he calls their 'spirit sickness.' While at the helm of Xinjiang University's first mixed-race team, he also starts a baseball program at a minority elementary school. For Parhat, baseball is more than a game; it's a vehicle for spiritual transformation. Finally, after a year of practice in the shadow of tense ethnic relations, Parhat and the university team travel 2,000 miles for their only game of the season - against a team of Tibetans on the Qinghai Plateau.